Kathryn: All right, I am going to step out of my bluff, breezy, don’t-

know- squat- about- philosophy- but- am- stuffed- up- to- the- noseholes-

with- good- honest- common- sense persona, and make a small confession. In

my early twenties, I discovered the Socratic dialogues and got hooked on

them for a while. Socrates, as portrayed by Plato, is a very attractive

figure in a way–and after all, he does speak mostly in plain sentences (a

surprising number of them interrogative). It’s all too easy to see what an

annoyance he must have been to the stuffed togas (? forgotten Greek

equivalent) of Athens. I still have the dialogues–all of them, Jowett’s

translations, in a 2,000-page blockbuster edition–on my shelf. It was a

phase, though. I have hardly looked at them since; and, leafing through

them now, feel my eyes growing heavy….